The average user of an email application receives many electronic messages a day. For ease of reference, it may be preferred that messages containing a particular type of content (e.g., emails relating to travels, such as rental car bookings, flight tickets, and hotel reservations) are automatically organized together, even though these messages themselves do not appear related to one another. As another example, users often like to have messages relating to social network updates (e.g., Jane, a law school friend, recently joined a GOOGLE+ group for young alumni; and Tim, a co-worker, has just published a vacation photo on his GOOGLE PICASA website), grouped together and visually presented together in a listing of the user's electronic messages.
Problems exist with offering such a feature, however. One problem is that constant updating of a group of messages can cause the group of messages to constantly appear at the top of a list of messages (e.g., an email inbox). For example, displaying “Travel” emails in a group and promoting the “Travel” email group to the top of a user's inbox every time a new email is added to the group. Another problem is that a user may wish to promote particular groups of electronic messages to the top of a listing of electronic messages, based on time (e.g., the day of the week, the time of day, the month of the year), quantity of messages (e.g., after the group has 5 or more messages) or quality (e.g., importance of the group or importance of the most recent message received and assigned to the group).
The above identified technical problems are reduced or eliminated by the systems and methods disclosed herein.